


a fair exchange

by ignitesthestars



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Arranged Marriage, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Kissing, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 06:13:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8833507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: They have been married five months when the urge finally creeps up on her.





	

They have been married five months when the urge finally creeps up on her.

Nikolai has been good to her. Which is a…tepid thing to say about your husband, and indicative of the only way she’s been able to think for a while now. Between the Darkling’s death and her break with Mal (both of which are dwarfed by the gaping hole in her that used to hold the sun), she has had too much to think about. Too much to process to worry about maybe loving the man who had made some attempt to give her another kind of power.

There is a large part of Alina that can’t stand that she thinks in those terms. The ebb and flow of power, the exchange of one strength for another. Nikolai had made some attempt to give her a _life._ A purpose. A place. But those are not the words that come to her first.

She can see it in him too; he has exchanged the power of his sheer exuberance for a darker gravitas. The freedom of the prince has become the weight of a king, and when she can find the focus to think about him and the darkness that has its grip on him, she finds that she almost likes it.

He has been her friend for longer than she had initially realised, but it’s only now that they’re really in a position to understand each other. Sometimes she thinks about the Darkling, about what he would say if he knew that what was supposed to be his ultimate punishment to Nikolai had ended ultimately in a deeper bond between him and Alina.

Those are the kinds of thoughts she shoves away, pushes into a dark corner of her mind like she can somehow make them go away. Whatever she’s been able to confront regarding her own relationship with power, she is nowhere near ready enough to deal with her relationship with the Darkling.

Maybe that’s a bad thing. Maybe she should have worked through every single one of her issues before even glancing sidelong at Nikolai, but she has a sneaking feeling that if she waited for that, there would be just one more thing in the way. So when the urge does finally overtake her, she just sort of…goes with it.

Genya would be proud.

“Can I kiss you?”

It’s the most innocuous of circumstances. He’s in his study and he’s _tinkering._ She has no idea what it is that he’s tinkering with, but the fact that he is at all - that he has taken his gloves off to deal with the small fiddly bits - makes a quiet, calm warmth expand in her chest. It’s no raging passion, but she doesn’t think that either one of them want or need raging passion right now.

There’s a moment there, when he stops, when his bare fingers tremble for the briefest of seconds, where she thinks that she has misjudged everything. That this marriage really is just a marriage of convenience and comfort and very platonic connection. That whatever part of him that ever wanted her was purged from him in the wake of the darkness put inside him by a man who - by a man.

The moment passes. He lifts his head to smirk at her, and the expression is so achingly familiar that the warmth in her chest does spark into something like heat, something more than a quiet, prompting urge.

“Can’t keep your mind off me, hmm?”

And she remembers that promise, a lifetime ago now. _Not until you’re thinking of me instead of trying to forget him._

She hasn’t thought of Mal once this night, not more than glancingly. Not for the past few nights. He comes to her now only because of Nikolai’s prompting, and slips away just as quietly.

“Is that a yes?” she shoots back. “Because if it’s a yes, there are more interesting things we could be doing than celebrating your ego.”

The bits of metal he’d been toying wih _clunk_ to the desk, and try as she might, she can’t keep her gaze off his lips as he moves towards her. It’s not quite a saunter, but it’s close enough that she feels the corner of her own mouth tug up.

“How interesting are we talking?”

“Why don’t you hurry up and find out?”

Their eyes meet in a single moment of serious honesty, where the banter falls aside and she allows him to see that she really means this, that she really wants this. And then his mouth is on hers, which is really him kissing her more than the other way around, but neither of them are really in a position to care about that right now.

As it turns out, they were talking pretty interesting.


End file.
